


Flop, Turn, River

by etal



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, Mild Angst, Mild Smut, Poker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:34:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26646838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etal/pseuds/etal
Summary: Oliver teaches Elio to play poker.
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 48
Kudos: 134





	Flop, Turn, River

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ghostcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostcat/gifts).



“Oliver.”

He was dozing on the grass, a book over his face, yellow shorts sitting low over his hips, an exposed line of tender white skin below the golden tan of his belly.

“Oliver.” 

No response. I wondered if his eyes were open under the book.

I nudged his leg with my bare toes, scuffed them against the hair on his thigh.

“Teach me,” I said.

He sighed, I heard it, under his book. So he was awake. I smiled.

One large hand came up and lifted the book away, snapped it shut.

“Teach you?”

“Poker. You promised.”

“Not now. Later.”

I’d watched him play in a lunchtime session at the bar in B. Watched him throw his cards down and scoop up the heap of notes and coins. I liked his long fingers on the deck when it was his turn to deal and the competent, unshowy way he shuffled the pack. He dealt with flair, a graceful spin from his wrist sending the cards floating to their precise placement on the table. He picked up his own hand casually, all insouciance, as if it bored him. The other players swore or grinned or glared when they saw their cards, and afterwards picked at them nervously, but he barely glanced at them, then tossed them face down in front of him and didn’t look at them again. It was impossible to see the moment when he decided whether to discard them or make them his partners in the game.

“How do you know when to give your cards back?” I asked that afternoon, by the pool. He was swimming lazy lengths, stopping every now and then to float on his back close to where I sat reading, dangling my feet in the water.

“When to fold, do you mean?”

I narrowed my eyes behind my sunglasses. “Alright, how do you know when to _fold_?”

One strong stroke brought him over to me and he rested his forearms on the side, his wet elbow cold against my warm thigh.

“Calculation of probabilities. Instinct. Observation.”

“So you always know whether the other players can beat you?”

“No,” (this was said with a rill of contempt) “although after a while of playing with someone you get to know how they react, whether they're really holding something or if they’re bluffing. Everyone has a tell they can’t hide and the more they try to conceal their reaction the more obvious it is.”

“What’s yours?”

“Everyone except me.” He propelled himself backwards through the water, sending a wave up and over my legs, onto the book on my lap. 

I couldn’t care less about poker but now I was determined to learn so I could discover his secret tell. He was reluctant to teach me. He said my parents might not like it. I laughed at that, and then he tried to say he didn’t have time. As we were sitting in the shade at that moment, drinking beer and competitively spitting olive stones, I laughed louder.

Still, he held out, all those first weeks when I was puzzling away at him, and he was keeping his cruel, careful distance. We didn’t have our poker lesson until the rain came. I was half-asleep on the sofa after lunch and he was restless, shuffling his books and papers, sighing and groaning like a schoolboy slaving over his Latin grammar.

I was jumped fully awake by a bang and saw him picking up a hardback book from the floor. I knew that trick. Amateur.

“I’m sorry, did I wake you from a good dream?”

He might have done, I couldn’t remember. There was something, the edge of an image, maybe, of a car and a bridge? It was like when you grip the corner of someone’s shirt as they pull away from you, the sliver of fabric between your fingers: for a moment you hold it and then it’s gone. It was gone. I shook my head, let my mouth make a ridiculous wobbling noise.

“How about I give you your poker tutorial? Unless you need a longer nap.”

“Ah, I’m kinda busy right now,” I said, yawning, arching my back up and stretching my bare legs along the couch. “Maybe la…”

“Sure, later.”

“Or now. Now is good.” 

For a second I thought I’d teased too far and annoyed him, but the rainy afternoon had softened his edges and he sent me to fetch the cards. 

He laid out examples of winning hands. “Three of a kind, see? Like, here, three Aces. Now…” he added an Ace. “Four of a kind. That’s only beaten by a Full House, that’s three of a kind and two of a kind together, or a Straight Flush, five cards in a sequence, same suit. And last, a Royal Flush, that’s like this, a run of cards starting with the Ten and going up to the Ace, all in the same suit, that’s the best you can get. Got it?”

He had me say them back to him. Then he tested me. It was easy enough but I made a mistake, once or twice, just to see what he would do, what he would look like if I disappointed him. I could see that he would be a good teacher. He was patient but he didn’t let me off the hook when I faked an error. The third time I did it, he gave me a look which let me know he was on to me. I didn’t try to cover up what I was doing. He paused, waited, until I gave the right answer.

“A Straight Flush, with the Nine that’s already there.”

“On the board.”

OK, a Straight Flush with the Nine that’s _on the board_.”

What light there was in the dimmed room seemed to cohere around him. Always, when the sun shone, it sought him, catching in the hair on his arms and haloing round his head, limning him in gold as if to say “here he is.” So even on this gloomy day I was lit up by the glow of him. I was so distracted by his hands that I could hardly keep myself from touching them. I thought any minute I might involuntarily drop my head and kiss those strong knuckles, the delicate skin between his tanned fingers, bite his broad thumb, chase the taste of his palm. I imagined fastening my teeth around his wrist.

I wanted to do that and watch for his tell, see what he looked like when he wasn’t sure what to do or what strength I might have.

This was Advanced Oliver Studies, a subject to which I was already devoting most of my time; discovering his tell would be an extra credit project. I conjured an image of myself addressing a lecture theatre, gesturing at a screen, clutching my slide-changer as I flipped between images of different colored shorts and diagrams depicting small variations in expression to an audience of Chiaras who would never approach my level of expertise.

“What’s funny?” 

“Nothing. Test me again.”

I was surprised by the poetry of the words Oliver taught me for each stage of the game. It began in comedy when I learned that the two cards I was given were my ‘hole’ cards and that the first three cards turned up on the table was the ‘flop’. 

“Are you 12? Stop sniggering. Now, we bet on how well we think we can do with what’s in our hands plus what we can use from the flop.”

The next words drifted towards something more romantic. The fourth card to be revealed, he told me, was the ‘turn’ and the final one was the ‘river’. The flop, the turn, the river. Each a moment when your fortunes could rise or fall until the river carried them away and the game was over.

When they saw what we were doing, of course my parents wanted to join in. They had a childish passion for all games and were unsophisticated about cards. They enjoyed being taught by Oliver and with them he was playful: with them, he shuffled in the manner of a magician to make them laugh, cascading the cards from one palm to another, bending their backs and snapping them back into a neat stack.

“A professional!” beamed my father, delighted. “He’ll take us for every dime!”

They played chaotically, constantly forgetting the stages of the game and how to place bets with the buttons we were using as currency. We played again after dinner and a second bottle of wine and Oliver was endlessly tolerant and good-humoured as they made increasingly wild mistakes and extravagant wagers but he kept a stern eye on me: he expected me to remember what he had taught me earlier. 

And I watched, waiting for one thing. The tell. I wanted it from him even more than I wanted to win the buttons he was methodically taking away from us.

After we had played for a while, I discovered what my own tell was. If I had a hand worth playing, my fingers went to my little heap of buttons and I couldn’t stop touching them, gathering them towards me, twitching them into new piles, like a greedy dragon brooding over its horde. 

When I realised what I was doing, I snapped my hand back and tucked it under my chin. I began squeezing up and down my throat instead.

Oliver smirked at me. He had known of course, seen my miser’s guard over my treasure trove.

Once, they had really been my treasures, these buttons in their oblong tin box, rusted at one end. The button box had been a magical thing when I was little. On a rainy day or an early morning, when I was awake even before Mafalda, I would take possession of it and could spend hours sorting and patterning, arranging the buttons into mountains of rubies, fields of sapphires. And if my mother joined me, she would extract the special buttons and whisper their provenance, as if the whole history of our family could be recorded in these little objects. There were three satiny white beauties which looked like pearls, from her wedding dress, and a collection of brass clasps that had a military appearance, and then handfuls of more quotidian buttons from work shirts and jackets. I had two especial favorites: one was from my Grandfather’s greatcoat and was thick and brown, with wavy segments like a _cartellate_ and looked like it should taste good; the other special one was golden and shaped like a crown. 

“I'm betting with this one Elio! From your bar mitzvah suit,” my mother said from across the table, holding up a bland brass circle. “That suit was…”

“Far too big for me, I know, you say that every time you see that button.”

She smiled her slow, secret smile at me, the one mothers use on sons grown tall and sarcastic, the one that says they remember every tear and every tantrum, your fear of the cellar room, your hand clutching theirs over the slippery stepping stones.

Oliver whistled. “Pro’s got a Big Slick.”

“I have?” said my father, gazing down at his Ace and King of Hearts. “Have I won?”

“Yes because, see, we can both make a pair of Kings but you’re holding an Ace and I only have a Ten.” Oliver pushed the winnings over to my father who gathered them with glee.

“You’ve stolen Elio’s bar mitzvah button from me,” my mother pouted, mock-distressed.

“Ah, he looked so sweet! His little suit was far too large for him, Oliver we must show you the pictures, the sleeves, do you remember…?”

Oliver was retrieving the cards, shuffling them back into order.

“Another hand?”

There was more wine and more badly played cards; I wanted to be grateful to him for diverting my parents’ attention from embarrassing me but I wasn’t sure if he’d done it on purpose, or if he was just bored with their anecdotes and wanted to win back his buttons. I watched and watched for his tell but he didn’t show a thing, whether he lost or won, which he mostly did.

The last hand of the night ended with just the two of us still playing. My parents both folded after the flop, surrendering the last of their buttons. Yawning, they drifted away from the table turning their minds towards arrangements for the next day, the expected dinner guests, the menu plans...

But I was holding two Kings, Hearts and Spades. And miraculously, on the table, the flop had given us a King of Clubs, as well as the Ten and Queen of Diamonds. I held myself as carefully still as I could although I could feel my heart beating a little faster. I hoped I wasn’t going red. I selected five buttons from my pile to make the bet and then sat on my hands so I couldn’t fiddle with them. 

Oliver raised his eyebrows at me. He looked back at his cards and bit his lip.

I snorted. Did he think that little pantomime would fool me?

He counted out the same number of buttons and then added two. “Raise,” he said.

I held his gaze and surrendered two more of my buttons. He nodded, ran his hand through his hair and tugged at it ( _don’t even try it, Oliver. If that’s your tell I’m Herodotus himself_ ) and said, “Check.”

I’d remember this moment a few days later when we were on the Berm and I dared myself to kiss him and he, for a moment, kissed me back and I felt the earth pulse right through my body, before he pulled back and refused to go further. For now, I was cunning enough to pretend to hesitate, as if I might fold or go higher, but he said, “Go on then.”

This was my cue to reveal the next card, the turn.

It was the Nine of Hearts. No good to me, but I didn’t even try to hide how hard I was staring at him. If the card meant anything to him, I wanted to know. If anything meant anything to him, I wanted to know.

It was nothing new, I was always looking at him anyway. He was continually bursting into my line of sight in those waiting days. When he wasn’t there, his absence taunted me: the space he should fill shaped like the weirdly distorted blanks that would slash across my field of vision when I had migraines.

This colonizing of my attention meant that, later, after the poker lessons, after the berm, when at last it happened, when we finally, finally turned towards each other, reverse Cinderellas on the stroke of midnight, fingers first, then toes, arms, chests, lips, it was a relief to be in the dark so I wasn't so distracted by the sight of him. I wasn’t ashamed of my appearance, or rather I veered, at that age, between an in-curling insecurity about my body and a peacock vanity which could feather out of me if I was wearing the right shirt and a girl looked over her shoulder at me in the street. But the dim light was right for my meeting with Oliver and gave me a place to hide from the intensity of it. When we exchanged our names, solemn as marriage vows, or when he first moved into me, making me panic for a moment until I found the way to make space for him, or when he slid down my body and touched me with his mouth on my hipbones and between my legs, and paused, lips circling my cock and holding still at such an angle that I knew he must be looking up at me, I was glad not to be able to see too much. The feeling, the knowledge that he was tasting me and _wanted to_ was enough on its own. 

It was time to turn the last card over - the one called the river. I paused with my fingers just touching its smooth back. Oliver had bought a new pack from B. having declared my family's haphazard collections totally unusable for a serious game, with their torn corners, creases, missing Jacks and scribbled over Jokers. I waited, enjoying this Schrödinger moment, when everything was already done and decided but we didn’t know it yet and the outcome was still full of possibility.

I flipped it over: the King of Diamonds.

The game hadn’t really enthralled me up to that point but the sheer ridiculous luck of that card appearing nearly made me gasp. I caught it just in time and bit my thumb instead.

Time to bet: with the air, I hoped, of a reckless Monte Carlo playboy, I pushed all my remaining buttons into the middle of the table.

“All in,” I said.

He tapped the tip of his finger once, twice against the back of his cards as if he was undecided. I rolled my eyes. 

“OK,” he said, “all in.”

His buttons joined mine, sliding promiscuously together. 

“You first,“ he said.

I laid my hand down.

“Four Kings. Four of a kind I mean,” I announced and I couldn’t keep the triumph out of my voice. Now I didn’t have to hide it any longer, I let my delight show and I couldn’t stop grinning.

Oliver looked down at my gang of Kings and then up to meet my eyes and I _saw it_ , the tiniest, tiniest quirk at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, not at all mocking, more like a tremor, as if a misplaced word had nearly escaped him so he’d swallowed it back.

“Ah man. You got me. You win. I don’t have anything.”

“Really? You were bluffing?”

“Yep. You take it all baby.” He gathered the cards, returning his hand and mine to the pack before I could snoop and see what he’d been holding. He threw back the last of the grappa in his glass, got up from the table, stretched and left me there with my abundance of buttons. 

I caught him up at the bedroom door. When he said good night there was no sign of the tell. I looked for it but didn’t see it again, in all our time together after that and it was only when we were on the train platform and he was leaving and neither of us could find anything to say which answered to what was happening to us, that it reappeared. He hugged me and I put my face against his chest for the last time, felt his fingers spread against the nape of my neck for the last time, felt his breath on my cheek for the last time. He hugged me close and I counted the seconds. And when he pulled back, there it was, the tell, the little jump in his lips. Maybe he didn’t even know it was there. But I did, and it was mine forever. A clue to the endless mystery of someone else’s face and the secret life behind their eyes. What they can tell you and what they can’t, and what they can’t hide, even when they try.

I took two other things from the poker games with Oliver. 

Item one: a button, boring, small and white. Nothing special. But it was the spare from Billowy, stitched into a tab at the back of the shirt. I cut it out and added it to the tin box so that it could live there safely with the brass bar mitzvah button and the little white satin pearls.

Item two: I composed a solo piece for my final recital at Julliard which I called ‘Flop, Turn, River’.

When one of my professors asked me, with some surprise, if I was into poker, I shrugged and said I wasn’t but that I’d known someone who was, and he’d taught me everything I knew about when to play and when to fold, and how to come out richer, either way.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday Ghostcat! I didn't make you beta your own birthday present this year.
> 
> Pleasingly, there is actually a track called ['The Flop, The Turn, The River'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0du_nCXqy0) but it's mainly, um, jazz harmonica. It's excellent in its own way but it's not the vibe of this story unfortunately:


End file.
